heh, after changing things one at a time and rebuilding/flashing more times than I want to count, I figured out those three things lol. Also I discovered that the character count in the shortcut file doesn't seem to be needed, I tried just making it
#"\Windows\whatever.exe"
instead of having the character count before the #, and it seems to work fine that way. Thanks for the post, wish I'd have read it before spending a couple hours troubleshooting
I guess the OEM faq that I got is out of date or a little incomplete.